The opening plenary abstract session at the 2020 annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) began with the definition of a new disease, identified through a new approach, and possibly leading to a new way to think about rheumatic diseases.
Keeping you up to date on recent developments in oncology, including: Study hints cystectomy not the only answer to muscle-invasive bladder cancer; Drugging resistant androgen receptors; ‘Don’t Eat Me’ signal doubles as ‘Don’t Find Me’; New algorithm may aid in oncology drug development.
Under the right circumstances, a single mouse can be as good as a group of eight or 10 animals in predicting whether a tumor will respond to a drug, researchers reported at the 2020 EORTC-NCI-AACR (ENA) Molecular Targets meeting on Saturday. The single-animal approach “allows incorporation of more tumor models within the same resource constraints,” Peter Houghton told reporters at a press conference previewing ENA highlights.
Mirati Therapeutics Inc.’s update on the phase I/II Krystal trial of the KRAS-G12C-targeting adagrasib (MRTX-849) was arguably the most eagerly awaited news, and certainly the most eagerly awaited KRAS-targeting news, to come out of the 2020 EORTC-NCI-AACR (ENA) Molecular Targets meeting. KRAS is one of the most frequently mutated oncogenes across a wide swath of solid tumors, and has been one of the toughest nuts to crack as far as druggability is concerned.
A multi-institutional team of researchers has implicated lipid droplets, which are key energy storage units of individual cells, in innate immune defense. "Until now it was thought that [lipid droplets] were at the service of viruses or bacteria during infection," Albert Pol told BioWorld. The new study, which was published in the Oct. 16, 2020, issue of Science, demonstrated that cells also use the droplets to coordinate their defense.
